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A Sweeter Water

In A Sweeter Water, Sara Henning’s debut collection, lyric surface collides with both dreamscape and haunted reality in a metanarrative of longing. Within a re-invented diction of elegy, loss is its own gripping and hazardous splendor: dahlia as talisman for new awakening, plush anchor to reclamation, water as cleansing taboo. Reminders that beauty is only an abbreviation for what is most brutal and tender.

An always-already absent father lost to suicide. A mother’s fragile mask shattered by betrayal. A daughter seeking a name and a face. In Sara Henning’s debut collection, these poems fiercely sing back love in all of its various incarnations from deep within the red clay chambers of a familial ground zero—even as love reveals itself to be sweet mirage, brutal illusion, or a cruel evanescence that must be relinquished into elegy. In piercingly gorgeous lyrics that stun us with both ruthlessness and beauty, Henning’s poems painstakingly climb their way up from the site of unspeakable loss—haunted by the footsteps of ghosts, and relentlessly interrogating the ontological complexities of naming, belonging, embodiment, and spirit. With clarity and compassion, these poems turn back and look directly into what hurts, singing us all into the forgiveness of a sweeter water.—Lee Ann Roripaugh, Author of On the Cusp of a Dangerous Year

In these poems, the familiar haunts, embodies strangeness, shimmers with the uncanny. The most tender touch is dangerous. To light the night, one sets a wasps’ nest ablaze. Here, anger transmutes to beauty. Here, the beautiful enthralls, lures, is a trap. The Italian painter, Giorgio Morandi, says, “I believe that nothing can be more abstract, more unreal, than what we actually see.” The poems in Sara Henning’s powerful debut collection confirm Morandi’s insight. —Eric Pankey, author of The Pear As One Example

Revolving around the subject of a father who has committed suicide, these are poems of memory and loss, poems which show us how a body “makes a story for the unmentionables of the past,” poems which shine a light on our desperate search for love, our desperate “need to touch something” and how because of that need we keep touching the “holes in our childhood/ that never stopped burning,” and finally, the poems in A Sweeter Water teach us how we must name things which are lost in order to fill the holes sorrow has dug through our lives. —Judy Jordan, author of Carolina Ghost Woods

Sara Henning is the author of one chapbook, To Speak of Dahlias (Finishing Line Press, 2012). She holds an MFA from George Mason University and is currently pursuing a PhD from the University of South Dakota, where she teaches and serves as Managing Editor for the South Dakota Review. She has been the recipient of residencies at both the Vermont Studio Center and the Performing Arts Forum in St. Erme, France. Her poetry, fiction, interviews and book reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in such journals as Crab Orchard Review, Verse, So To Speak, American Letters & Commentary, and Willow Springs, among others, and she has poems anthologized in Women Write Resistance: Poets Resist Gender Violence (Hyacinth Girl Press, 2013).